US - Bergen: Bin Laden, CIA links hogwash

and he's right.

Q: If it's true that bin Laden once worked for the CIA, what makes you so sure that he isn't still?

Anne Busigin, Toronto, Canada

BERGEN: This is one of those things where you cannot put it out of its misery.

The story about bin Laden and the CIA -- that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden -- is simply a folk myth. There's no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn't have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn't have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently.

We don't need ancedotal evidence when we have the words of bin Laden himself. In this interview with Robert Fisk, the only reporter he trusts (that should tell you a lot about Fisk), bin Laden himself tells you he never worked with or for the CIA.

"Personally neither I nor my brothers saw evidence of American help."

Seems pretty clear to me.